Bforartists comes with a powerful bones system. And various animation features.

Tracking for you!

Bforartists offers Camera and Object Tracking.

Post Processing makes it shine!

Bforartists comes with a built in compositor.

Nodes Nodes Nodes!

Cycles offers a nodes based approach to create your shaders.

Scripting can do!

Extend the functionality by your own Python scripts.

What is Bforartists?

Bforartists is a complete 3D suite to create 3D content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, prerendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing. Have a look at the features page to find out more.

Bforartists stands for Be For Artists. A reminder to develop for the user, not the programmer.

Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3d software Blender. And, similar to Blender, of course also open source and under the GPL v2 or higher, better said in the sum under GPL v3 license. The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability. This means a complete switch in the useage philosophy. Away from the hotkey and speed centered useage. Towards a user friendly and intuitive graphical UI.

Note that Bforartists is fully functional. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists.

Note also, we are always searching for volunteers to get the development going. Every help is welcome :)

I have tried to implement a new editor type as you may know. And then abandoned it, since the last chapter made too much trouble. I will try to implement the needed features into the existing editors now.

The try was not a complete fail though. The first two chapters, creating the basic editor and adding a file menu, worked fine. The third chapter, the theming, was also working in the end. Even when i am not so sure if it was done correct. And just the last chapter, to add the content to the new editor, made big trouble then.

That's three of four working. Enough for a little document that describes the necessary steps. And so i decided to put the information online before the information starts to rot at my hdd. Maybe it helps the one or another.

The API is fully functional, but not fully finished yet. It contains everything it needs. That's not the problem. The problem is that it contains a few more things than it should. It is a conversion from Blender. And contains lots of links that still leads to Blender sources. This needs to be fixed at a one by one base. And there are lots of those links. And there are also some small other things that needs a fix. A backlink to the Bforartists page for example. But for now it's good enough.

The conversion of the Blender manual to Bforartists is finally done. Lots of work comes to an end. The Bforartists manual is live. It can be found in the Wiki

The conversion is finished. But it is of course not done with converting the Blender Manual over to Bforartists. There is still lots of work left. I did not care for the layout in this step. Not for outdated and missing content. Also not for the stone old images that can be found here and there. Some of them goes back to Blender 2.49 and earlier. And we have to fill it with our changes. And we will do. Every new version will from now on find its changes in the manual. The first small adjustments like custom wireframe colors or that you can hide the 3D editor have already found their way into the manual.

Yes, you have read right. Blender Manual. This Blender manual as PDF is a side product of the Bforartists development. Bforartists needs a manual too. And the Blender manual is the base for the Bforartists manual. I do think that the Blender manual in PDF is of use for some. And so i publish this for me intermediate step.

Additionally it comes with the whole manual in ODT format too. Which makes the manual editable for everybody. ODT is the format for the popular free office suites LibreOffice and OpenOffice. I have written the odt files with LibreOffice 5.

Version 0.3.0 brings 130 new icons. And icon only buttons in the tool shelf. Which reduces the need for scrolling in this area dramatically. You can still use the text buttons though. The checkbox to switch to text buttons is in the properties sidebar in the 3D View in the Display section.

This release is rather small. The main work for this version was to develop the Important Hotkeys addon, which is included into Bforartists now. The scripting layout is changed, including some tweaks at the menu. It has now a File menu like every standard text editor. And we have some more minor tweaks like readded hotkeys, a handful new menu items and some more removed double entries. Really not this much.

200 issues were fixed. 60 of it were the Blender 2.76 a and b patches. 140 ones are actual changes at Bforartists.

This release brings the new official Bforartists keymap. Where nearly all hotkeys for tools, to cycle through menus, and to call popup panel menus are removed. The user has finally single key hotkeys available again to assign them to important tools. Most of the standard hotkeys, like copy and paste, and navigation keys like the numpad keys to switch views are still there though.

The main reason for this release was the merge of Blender 2.76 into the trunk. And to finally get rid of two nasty show stopper bugs in the version 0.1. The console stayed open after start. And it was no good idea to change the internal version number. This leaded to a warning every time you loaded a Blender file. Bforartists 0.2.0 should now be fully functional, and should just work like Blender 2.76. Minus the game engine. See below.

Another big milestone is reached. There are the first binaries available for Bforartists. Version 0.1. It is the initial release, the move from Blender to Bforartists. So the main changes are of course the logos and the branding, and that everything works together with the new name. But there are already some first changes in the UI.

The Factory Settings theme is now the blueish theme that can be found in the UI design document. And there are already a few changes at the standard settings too. Including the important change of the default selection method from RMB to LMB. For all changes see the Release Note